The present invention relates to agricultural balers, particularly of the rectangular bale type, utilizing twine to bind bales.
Agricultural balers utilizing automatic knotters have been available for many years. In use, such knotters, while being effective in binding bales with twine, result in small amounts of twine commonly known as twine tails being wasted after each knotting operation. Although the amounts of twine wasted are not great (i.e. twine tails approximately 3 to 8 cm long), they build up and may eventually cause knotter tying problems. The presence of twine tails has also been detected in wool during processing and manufacturing. The twine tails are usually black or of a dark color when synthetic twine is used, and if undetected, can be incorporated into the wool manufacturing and processing stages, at which point they are almost impossible to remove.
The twine tails from a knotting operation are sometimes picked up by the sheep in its fleece during feeding of the bale in the field, and may go undetected through the initial wool processing stages. Even the smallest scrap of twine in a bale of wool can render the finished fabric virtually worthless. It should be noted that scraps of synthetic twine are not readily broken down, as is twine manufactured from natural fibers.
The present invention has an object to provide an improvement in an agricultural baler in which knotter twine tails are collected.